Peter principle
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
Peter and Hull intended the book to be satire,[4] but it became popular as it was seen to make a serious point about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within hierarchical organizations.
The Peter principle states that a person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills.
This leads to Peter's corollary: "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties."
One of these illusory exceptions is when someone who is incompetent is still promoted anyway—they coin the phrase "percussive sublimation" for this phenomenon of being "kicked upstairs" (cf.
[3]: 52 "Pull", on the other hand, is far more effective and refers to accelerated promotion brought about by the efforts of an employee's mentors or patrons.
Chapter 8, titled "Hints and Foreshadowings", discusses the work of earlier writers on the subject of incompetence, such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Alexander Pope.
[3]: 93 Chapters 11 and 12 describe the various medical and psychological manifestations of stress that may come as result of someone reaching their level of incompetence, as well as other symptoms such as certain characteristic habits of speech or behavior.
Similarly, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) wrote that "there is nothing more common than to hear of men losing their energy on being raised to a higher position, to which they do not feel themselves equal.
"[7] Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) virtually enunciated the Peter principle in 1910, "All public employees should be demoted to their immediately lower level, as they have been promoted until turning incompetent.
The other is that it is a statistical process: workers who are promoted have passed a particular benchmark of productivity based on factors that cannot necessarily be replicated in their new role, leading to a Peter principle situation.
[10] Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo (2010) used an agent-based modelling approach to simulate the promotion of employees in a system where the Peter principle is assumed to be true.
[12] Later work has shown that firms that follow the Peter Principle may be disadvantaged, as they may be overtaken by competitors, or may produce smaller revenues and profits;[13] as well why success most often is a result of luck rather than talent—work which earned Pluchino and Rapisarda a second Ig Nobel Prize in 2022.
[14] In 2018, professors Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue analyzed sales workers' performance and promotion practices at 214 American businesses to test the veracity of the Peter principle.
[18] Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths have suggested the additive increase/multiplicative decrease algorithm as a solution to the Peter principle less severe than firing employees who fail to advance.
The Incompetence Opera[20] is a 16-minute mini-opera that premiered at the satirical Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in 2017,[21] described as "a musical encounter with the Peter principle and the Dunning–Kruger effect".
